TannisRoot on 24/9/2014 at 18:58
Quote Posted by Abysmal
How was XII? That one seemed to fall off the radar as soon as it was released, but I remember all the reviews claiming it was the best FF since VII.
You'll find lots of fans of XII. It's also probably the biggest departure for the series. The combat is markably different. More akin to MMO style where you control one member of a party at a time and the other members are controlled by AIs. You can pause or swap member's on the fly, and the AIs can be swapped between tank, healing, spells, etc. You can also pause and play turn by turn, character by character if I recall.
Story wise:
It stars yet another Tidus-like character. So if you disliked Tidus, you'll probably dislike Vaan. He serves as an audience surrogate, but does little to move the plot. He asks questions the audience would likely ask and serves as a PoV to far more interesting characters.
That said, there are some cool factors. Balthier is basically Han Solo, except he has a badass playboy bunny for a sidekick instead of Chewwy. There's also a princess, an evil empire, and probably other Star Wars parallels that can be drawn.
Overall, there are things to like with some detractors that may or may not offend you. It's not really comparable to VII though. The two games are completely different on far too many levels: tone, themes, characters, style, music, gameplay, and other factors.
Zerker on 24/9/2014 at 20:23
The main problem I had with XII (and X for that matter) is that they both have a relatively flat level system. So if you get behind in levels, you don't really get a helping hand to catch up. In XII after the first main story arc, I ended up around level 15 with level 22 enemies, and that gap was NOT closing in a comfortable rate, so I gave up. FFX I had a similar problem after some large plain area that I didn't really mess with very much. When I was exploring around some cave later, the enemies seemed much harder than my party was really ready for, and the sphere grid system basically means that I'd need to fight just about as many battles as I may have 'skipped' not doing optional content just to get caught up again.
So I'm going to say skip anything past 7, though maybe do 9. The problem with 9 is the battle system gets so backlogged that you're choosing actions while the previous selected actions haven't even happened yet. It's a matter of guessing what's already in the battle queue, and it's kinda broken. I did finish it though, so that's something.
For reference, my favourite right now is probably 5, though 6 and 4 are pretty close.
TannisRoot on 25/9/2014 at 18:03
Hmm, I never had a problem keeping up on the leveling curve of X. Higher level monsters offer more XP standard, so you can close the gap quickly.
Zerker on 25/9/2014 at 21:10
That's NORMALLY the case with RPGs, but in FFX everything is tied to exactly where you are on the sphere grid, and how many sphere grid upgrade spheres you get, and how the placement of said spheres help in actually making you more effective. I found I was spinning my wheels, but I guess I didn't stick around long enough to see if I was getting comparatively more spheres or not. Either way, it didn't help me.
This is also getting somewhat off topic, since FFX isn't coming to PC as far as I'm aware :).
Tony_Tarantula on 28/9/2014 at 01:07
Never was a fan of FFX. Boring plot, cliche'd themes, and racist undertones made for one that I put down halfway through.
EvaUnit02 on 10/10/2014 at 08:05
Good news:- No 30FPS limit. Includes both English and Japanese audio options.
Bad news:- Gameplay resolution is locked to 1280x720. Durante of DSfix fame has already "fixed" it however. (
http://blog.metaclassofnil.com/)
Even if the game is a pile of ass, there is no excuse for releasing a AAA game like this on PC without the fundamentally basic feature of being able to change resolution.
